National Youth Rights Association

Chabot doesn't use censorware. Over and out.

We do have the money for a domain, it's less than 10 bucks per year.

Point of information: Zach came up with the idea, not me. I don't think it's the best idea in the world, since it is just a variation on giving in to those schools that do censor us, but it is better than censoring the forums outright.

I'd rather see us start with doing what we should have done a long time ago: Have a complete student rights section and a complete free speech/free expression section (ideally with a better name than that), both including a link to a subsection on internet censorship (at school/at home/in public). The next step would be to target those schools that do censor speech and access to our site. We would need ways to identify what schools do so and a plan of action for how to deal with them. Doing something in connection with a revived Peacefire community/anti-censorware training corps would be great, I think.

We would also need to sort out who exactly is going to do all this work.

If all of that was done first, and were the top priorities, a compromise on the forums issue would be to move them to youthrights.com and expand them with the CMS hacks for vbulletin.

Under no circumstances do I think we should censor the use of subjectively offensive or emotionally expressive speech on these forums. Nor should we censor the use of heavily charged words when used in a way that is either discussing the significance of those words, making fun of their more negative meaning (such as the thread where gayleaning members of the forums are taking a quiz called What Kind of Faggot Are You?), or any other way in which it isn't a direct bigoted attack.

My biggest concern here is that it is easy to demand a solution to a problem (often, as Rich has pointed out, without determining whether it really is a big problem)… But when it comes time to do the actual work for such many are nowhere to be found. I'd worry if we simply moved the forums first that it would be another year or longer before there was any serious motivation to do the more important work of finishing a student rights section, a speech section, and having a forward strategy against censorship in schools.

Prove me wrong please. I would welcome the work being done.

Need help working on any of the rights sections? I could be able to work on an essay or two if you really need it. ^^

AKAadamkewldawg wrote: My school doesn't block it. BCS Technology (Buncombe County Schools) which they have their own server does not currently block NYRA. However, the media center of the school, at its own discretion, may block or unblock sites. They have the whole google images blocked down.

I never could find out what the censorware is. Anymore, all that shows up is a "This Page Cannot Be Displayed" thing, but I think it is like 8e8/8e3/838 or something.

Here's an idea. Have multiple installations of the board on multiple sites (domains). The forum software can be installed anywhere on the Internet and as long as it is set to access the vBulletin database here on youthrights.org, every forum on every site will be a perfect mirror (users, settings, posts, everything) of this one. Blocking software won't realize it if 10 different forums at 10 different domains are all accessing the same database on one domain (this one).

Say, for instance, if I install this same version of vBulletin at snipermedia.net, snipeme.com, and everythingaboutsex.info. The forum files themselves will be on my server, but all the data will come from this server's SQL database, so it will be a mirror of this forum regardless of where the files are at. Hell, with this method, I would be hosting a mirror and not even have any mod/admin access to the board itself (b/c I have no access to the database).

As long as all the domains (mirrors) are known to our members, that vastly increases the chances of getting around any blocks. Food for thought

[EDIT] Xavier, you say your school uses Bess and NYRA is blocked? According the the N2H2 URL Checker, youthrights.org is not listed in their database. Your school must have NYRA blocked manually, it is not blocked by Bess.

As a quick response,

if the forums are blocked, the whole site is. Because its the same domain. So skin thing, won't work. But, another variation would be to have a "clean" version on the youthrights domain and a regular version of the forums on a different domain. With huge disclaimers. Still.

Some censorware block anylink with the word forum in it. With BHS (my school) I do not think this is the case. It was blocked after the whole n-word debate started up. The sheer number of people using it to flame ekid triggered the spiders and it was blocked. This is only a theory, not nescessarily true.

But, forums blocked for any reason, site blocked too.

Galen's idea sounds good, if complicated, but I do see one problem. What kind of organization do we want to look like, going behing the software's and school's back to get to the forums? Also, I really couldn't care less about getting the forums to work at school (it'd be nice, though). I'll take the site. If I'm wrong, correct me.

The school might have blocked it manually.